Neural Dynamics of Context-Sensitive Adjustments in Cognitive Flexibility

To adaptively interact with the uncertainties of daily life, we must match our level of cognitive flexibility to contextual demands—being more flexible when frequent shifting between different tasks is required and more stable when the current task requires a strong focus of attention. Such cognitive flexibility adjustments in response to changing contextual demands have been observed in cued task-switching paradigms, where the performance cost incurred by switching versus repeating tasks (switch cost) scales inversely with the proportion of switches (PS) within a block of trials. However, the neural underpinnings of these adjustments in cognitive flexibility are not well understood. Here, we recorded 64-channel EEG measures of electrical brain activity as participants switched between letter and digit categorization tasks in varying PS contexts, from which we extracted ERPs elicited by the task cue and alpha power differences during the cue-to-target interval and the resting precue period. The temporal resolution of the EEG allowed us to test whether contextual adjustments in cognitive flexibility are mediated by tonic changes in processing mode or by changes in phasic, task cue-triggered processes. We observed reliable modulation of behavioral switch cost by PS context that was mirrored in both cue-evoked ERP and time–frequency effects but not by blockwide precue EEG changes. These results indicate that different levels of cognitive flexibility are instantiated after the presentation of task cues, rather than by being maintained as a tonic state throughout low- or high-switch contexts.

Dynamics of Morphological Indicators of Blood of Piglets under the Influence of Iron Clathrochelate Complex and Cyanocobalamin

Iron deficiency anemia is one of the most common non-contagious diseases of piglets. Veterinary antianemic drugs have several drawbacks, so finding new medicines is an important current task for scientists. Therefore, the present study investigated the antianemic effect of iron (IV) clathrochelate in the organism of piglets. The subsequent studies included the exploration of its antianemic actions, particularly in combination with cyanocobalamin when this combination was administered to sows for prophylaxis in piglets. The experiment was carried out on 30 suckling piglets during the period of their detention with sows. According to the method of analogue groups, two groups of control (I) and experimental (II, each containing 15 animals) were formed and they were studied for 30 days. The piglets from five sows (three from each) were selected for the experimental group. During the pregnancy of these sows, 10 ml of 10% solution of iron (IV) IV clathrochelate and solution of cyanocobalamin were injected intramuscularly twice 7 and 14 days before their expected farrowing. For prevention of iron deficiency anemia, the traditional solution of iron dextran was administered once intramuscularly to piglets of the control group. The investigative material included the blood samples of piglets considering the dynamics of probable changes in the number of erythrocytes, hemoglobin content and hematocrit, and other morphological indicators and blood indices of piglets. The dynamics of changes in erythrocyte count, hemoglobin content, hematocrit, leukocytes and platelets, indices of blood almost did not differ from the dynamics of these values when using only 10% solution of iron (IV) clathrochelate for pregnant sows. The proposed scheme for the prophylaxis of iron deficiency anemia in piglets, involving simultaneous intramuscular injections of IV clathrochelate and cyanocobalamin to pregnant sows, is somewhat inferior to the previous preventive measures, which included only the intramuscular injections of iron (IV) IV clathrochelate, but it can be recommended as highly effective.

Improving Cognitive Flexibility by Means of Associations

The work examines the effect of association means on the cognitive flexibility of the brain. Nowadays the cognitive flexibility is one of the critical skills needed to succeed in the workplace. Cognitive flexibility corrects human behaviour in a certain way following the changing environment. It allows a modern person to work effectively to distract from the previous task, reconfigure a new set of answers to complete the current task. The article aims to determine the significance of the means of association for improving cognitive flexibility in foreign languages classes. The study involved 70 students of the Kyiv National University of Culture and Arts and was conducted between October 2020 and December 2020. Learning a foreign language and bilingualism in and of themselves have an impact on the cognitive functions of the brain. In our paper, we consider the means of associations not only as one of the tools for studying foreign languages but as a means of improving cognitive flexibility. According to the study, it can be concluded that, despite the increased interest in the associative method, multiple studies in this area of ​​research demonstrate different and sometimes conflicting results. It is important to note that associative methods have a positive effect on improving cognitive flexibility in combination with creative thinking.

List Scheduling Algorithm Based on Virtual Scheduling Length Table in Heterogeneous Computing System

Edge computing needs the close cooperation of cloud computing to better meet various needs. Therefore, ensuring the efficient implementation of applications in cloud computing is not only related to the development of cloud computing itself but also affects the promotion of edge computing. However, resource management and task scheduling strategy are important factors affecting the efficient implementation of applications. Therefore, aiming at the task scheduling problem in cloud computing environment, this paper proposes a new list scheduling algorithm, namely, based on a virtual scheduling length (BVSL) table algorithm. The algorithm first constructs the predicted remaining length table based on the prescheduling results, then constructs a virtual scheduling length table based on the predicted remaining length table, the current task execution cost, and the actual start time of the task, and calculates the task priority based on the virtual scheduling length table to make the overall path the longest task is scheduled first, thus effectively shorten the scheduling length. Finally, the processor is selected for the task based on the predicted remaining length table. The selected processor may not be the earliest for the current task, but it can shorten the finish time of the task in the next phase and reduce the scheduling length. To verify the effectiveness of the scheduling method, experiments were carried out from two aspects: randomly generated graphs and real-world application graphs. Experimental results show that the BVSL algorithm outperforms the latest Improved Predict Priority Task Scheduling (IPPTS) and RE-18 scheduling methods in terms of makespan, scheduling length ratio, speedup, and the number of occurrences of better quality of schedules while maintaining the same time complexity.

An Interactive Task Conditioning System Featuring Personal Comfort Models and Non-Intrusive Sensing Techniques: A Field Study in Shanghai

Heating, ventilation and air-conditioning (HVAC) systems play a key role in shaping office environments. However, open-plan office buildings nowadays are also faced with problems like unnecessary energy waste and an unsatisfactory shared indoor thermal environment. Therefore, it is significant to develop a new paradigm of an HVAC system framework so that everyone could work under their preferred thermal environment and the system can achieve higher energy efficiency such as task ambient conditioning system (TAC). However, current task conditioning systems are not responsive to personal thermal comfort dynamically. Hence, this research aims to develop a dynamic task conditioning system featuring personal thermal comfort models with machine learning and the wireless non-intrusive sensing system. In order to evaluate the proposed task conditioning system performance, a field study was conducted in a shared office space in Shanghai from July to August. As a result, personal thermal comfort models with indoor air temperature, relative humidity and cheek (side face) skin temperature have better performances than baseline models with indoor air temperature only. Moreover, compared to personal thermal satisfaction predictions, 90% of subjects have better performances in thermal sensation predictions. Therefore, personal thermal comfort models could be further implemented into the task conditioning control of TAC systems.

Analysis of information and psychological impact on personality in COVID-19 pandemic conditions

В настоящей статье проанализированы теоретические аспекты информационно-психологического воздействия на личность. Основными сферами информационно-психологического воздействия являются: экономические, политические, военные и т.д. Реализация процесса информационно-психологического воздействия направлена на основные сферы жизнедеятельности индивида или социальной группы посредством средств массовой информации, социальных сетей, глобальных компьютерных сетей, слухов (фейковых новостей) и т.д. Важнейшей задачей эффективного противодействия является своевременное выявление и идентификация информационно-психологического влияния, а также точная оценка возможных деструктивных последствий, которые могут привести к информационному и психологическому вмешательству. В данной связи актуальной задачей является изучение рассматриваемых в статье вопросов. В настоящее время в связи с возрастанием потока информации из различных источников актуальность обретает разработка мер предупреждения информационно-психологического воздействия и негативных последствий в виде изменения потребностей индивида (групп людей) посредством манипуляторных действий производителей и поставщиков товаров и услуг. Авторами статьи изучена реализация процесса управления социальными системами в информационном обществе, представленная российскими и зарубежными авторами. Приведены основные понятия, классификации методов информационно-психологического воздействия, выделены и разграничены методы, оказывающие наиболее высокое воздействие на людей с критическим и некритическим восприятием информации. Важнейшими характеристиками мыслительной деятельности личности являются: самостоятельность, критичность мышления, глубина и гибкость мышления, анализ и поиск решения задач. Представлен литературный обзор и основные выводы исследователей сущности и содержания процесса информационно-психологического воздействия. Проведен анализ информационно-психологического влияния на человека (группы лиц) в период пандемии. This paper analyzes theoretical aspects of information-psychological influence on personality. The main areas of information and psychological impact include economic, political, military, etc. The implementation of the process of information and psychological impact is aimed at the main spheres of life of an individual or social group through the media, social networks, global computer networks, rumors (fake news), etc. The most important task of effective counteraction is the timely identification of information and psychological influence, as well as an accurate assessment of possible destructive consequences that can lead to information and psychological intervention. In this regard, the current task is to study the issues discussed in the paper. At present, as the flow of information from various sources increases, the development of information prevention measures becomes relevant. At present, as the flow of information from various sources increases, the development of measures to prevent information and psychological effects and negative consequences in the form of changing the needs of the individual (groups of people) through manipulative actions of manufacturers and suppliers of goods and services becomes relevant. The authors of the publication studied the implementation of the process of managing social systems in the information society, presented by Russian and foreign authors. Basic concepts, classifications of methods of information-psychological impact are given, methods having the highest impact on people with critical and non-critical perception of information are identified and delineated. The most important characteristics of a person's thought activity are independence, criticality of thinking, depth and flexibility of thinking, analysis and search for solutions to problems. Literary overview and main conclusions of researchers on essence and content of the process of information-psychological impact are presented. An analysis of the information and psychological impact on the person (groups of persons) during the pandemic was carried out.

DISTRIBUTION OF SIVERS APPLES IN THE TERRITORY OF THE TARBAGATAI STATE NATIONAL NATURAL PARK

The current task in the study of Malus sieversii is the balanced use and protection, conservation, reforestation of the vegetation cover. Malus sieversii is a valuable gene pool on the territory of the State National Natural Park «Tarbagatai», therefore, the study, preservation of its form diversity is necessary for modern and future breeding, reforestation, afforestation. In order to preserve Malus sieversii in its original form, phenological monitoring of environmental, anthropogenic, natural and climatic factors of conditions affecting it is carried out and studied. An important role in increasing the productivity, quality and sustainability of Malus sieversii plantings is played by methods of conducting phenological monitoring control throughout the year, for many years.

Entity Recommendation for Everyday Digital Tasks

Recommender systems can support everyday digital tasks by retrieving and recommending useful information contextually. This is becoming increasingly relevant in services and operating systems. Previous research often focuses on specific recommendation tasks with data captured from interactions with an individual application. The quality of recommendations is also often evaluated addressing only computational measures of accuracy, without investigating the usefulness of recommendations in realistic tasks. The aim of this work is to synthesize the research in this area through a novel approach by (1) demonstrating comprehensive digital activity monitoring, (2) introducing entity-based computing and interaction, and (3) investigating the previously overlooked usefulness of entity recommendations and their actual impact on user behavior in real tasks. The methodology exploits context from screen frames recorded every 2 seconds to recommend information entities related to the current task. We embodied this methodology in an interactive system and investigated the relevance and influence of the recommended entities in a study with participants resuming their real-world tasks after a 14-day monitoring phase. Results show that the recommendations allowed participants to find more relevant entities than in a control without the system. In addition, the recommended entities were also used in the actual tasks. In the discussion, we reflect on a research agenda for entity recommendation in context, revisiting comprehensive monitoring to include the physical world, considering entities as actionable recommendations, capturing drifting intent and routines, and considering explainability and transparency of recommendations, ethics, and ownership of data.

Target State Classification by Attention-Based Branch Expansion Network

The intelligent laboratory is an important carrier for the development of the manufacturing industry. In order to meet the technical state requirements of the laboratory and control the particle redundancy, the wearing state of personnel and the technical state of objects are very important observation indicators in the digital laboratory. We collect human and object state datasets, which present the state classification challenge of the staff and experimental tools. Humans and objects are especially important for scene understanding, especially those existing in scenarios that have an impact on the current task. Based on the characteristics of the above datasets—small inter-class distance and large intra-class distance—an attention-based branch expansion network (ABE) is proposed to distinguish confounding features. In order to achieve the best recognition effect by considering the network’s depth and width, we firstly carry out a multi-dimensional reorganization of the existing network structure to explore the influence of depth and width on feature expression by comparing four networks with different depths and widths. We apply channel and spatial attention to refine the features extracted by the four networks, which learn "what" and "where", respectively, to focus. We find the best results lie in the parallel residual connection of the dual attention applied in stacked block mode. We conduct extensive ablation analysis, gain consistent improvements in classification performance on various datasets, demonstrate the effectiveness of the dual-attention-based branch expansion network, and show a wide range of applicability. It achieves comparable performance with the state of the art (SOTA) on the common dataset Trashnet, with an accuracy of 94.53%.

IMPROVEMENT OF THE ORGANIZATIONAL AND LEGAL FRAMEWORK OF OPERATIONAL-SEARCH MEASURES IN THE FIGHT AGAINST ILLEGAL EXPORT OF CURRENCY VALUES IS A CURRENT TASK

To date, there are known cases of illegal export of foreign currency from the Republic of Uzbekistanto foreign countries. The continuation of this negative trend will lead to an increase and increase in the smuggling of foreign currency from the Republic of Uzbekistan, as well as a violation of the monetary policy of Uzbekistan. Therefore, the fight against smuggling of foreign currency from the Republic of Uzbekistan to foreign countries remains an urgent task. Based on the foregoing, this scientific article describes in detail the proposals for preventing the illegal export of foreign currency from the Republic of Uzbekistan, for improving the organizational and legal basisof operational-search measures to combat illegal export of foreign currency from the Republic of Uzbekistan.Keywords: operational-search activity, operational-search activities, operational officer, operational analysis,currency, currency values, foreign economic activity, illegal export, cryptocurrency, foreign countries